Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America by Gorica Majstorovic

Abstract

 Reviews Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America . By G M. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. . x+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. is highly innovative contribution to the field presents a timely re-evaluation of the Latin American modernist and avant-garde literature of the inter-war period through an anti-imperialist lens, drawing on a range of conceptual frameworks from both postcolonial and decolonial critical traditions. Building on the scholarship of Walter Mignolo, Beatriz Sarlo, Pheng Cheah, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Global Modernities examines the Latin American literary histories of the early twentieth century both as a nexus of decolonial thought and cultural production within the Global South and as a forerunner of the transnational South–South solidarities which would emerge during the s and s. Defining the Global South as both physical and geographical space, as well as ‘a discursive position from which theories of globalization are exposed and denounced’ (p. xiii), Gorica Majstorovic’s text maintains a focus which is firmly transnational. Considering avant-garde literary periodicals from across the continent , Mexican petrofiction, novels from Ecuador and Argentina, and travel writing from Nicaraguan and Dominican authors, this study sheds light on the multiple modernities at work in Latin America during this period. e corpus is impressive in its diversity of both geography and form, and successfully uncovers a network of connections between modernist cultural experimentation and emergent decolonial thought. e intermedial bent of the book is key here, as it facilitates a broader dialogue between the central literary texts of the corpus and other forms of contemporary mass culture, such as cinema, radio, and photography. Chapters  and  examine the output of a range of Latin American avant-garde magazines of the s, foregrounding the cultural and intellectual dialogue which these publications generated across the Global South as the engine of an alternative modernity which encompassed Andean indigenismo, the Harlem Renaissance, and the peripheral European modernism of the Balkans. Chapter  presents a new perspective on the novels Baldomera by Ecuadorian writer Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and Los siete locos by the Argentine Roberto Arlt, using the aesthetics of Russian constructivist cinematic montage to elicit new meanings from both texts. Chapter  focuses on the mobility of Latin American modernities in the travel writing of, among others, Rubén Darío, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Ricardo Güiraldes. Finally , in Chapter  the author addresses the concept of cosmopolitanism in the Global South in the inter-war years through a study of Armando Discépolo’s  play Babilonia, foregrounding socio-economic factors such as mass immigration, precarity, and marginality to identify a dissident and radical ‘improbable cosmopolitanism ’ (p. ). Overall, Global Modernities convincingly advances a key thesis, namely that a more profound understanding of modernity generally, and in Latin America in particular, cannot be achieved without critical engagement with issues of empire, indigeneity, and decolonialization. By highlighting the threads of antiimperialism and transnational solidarity that run through the continent’s inter-war MLR, .,   literary production, this study destabilizes hegemonic anglophone subjectivities of the modern and posits the Global South as a key site in the articulation of a plural modernity in which aesthetics and the politics of social justice are inextricably intertwined. E B L Cortázar and Music. By N R. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Alongside literature and politics, music is an inescapable presence in the work of Julio Cortázar. In this thorough and wide-ranging study, Nicholas Roberts provides a detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which music appears in the novels, short stories, and critical work of the Argentine. In the process, he reveals that music was no mere leitmotiv, but rather provided the structural tools for key works. Cortázar loved music, wrote passionately about his preferences, and created memorable characters—Horacio Oliveira, the stuffy French critic Bruno, Johnny Carter—for whom music is more than just entertainment or pastime: it is the stuff of life itself. Roberts divides his subject’s musical interests into three broad genres: la música culta, or classical music; tango, Argentina’s (and Uruguay’s) beloved national sound; and jazz, from early New Orleans stylings through to...